The Complete Guide to Skip Tracing for Wholesalers
This guide is part of our complete wholesale disposition walkthrough.
You have a list of property owners who might want to sell. Or a list of investors who might want to buy. Either way, you have names and addresses but no way to contact them. Skip tracing bridges that gap by turning property records into phone numbers and email addresses you can actually use.
The term comes from debt collection: "skip" refers to someone who has "skipped town," and tracing is the process of finding them. In real estate, the concept is simpler. You're not looking for people who are hiding. You're looking for contact information that isn't in the public record.
How skip tracing works
Skip trace services aggregate data from multiple sources: phone company records, utility connections, voter registrations, social media profiles, credit headers, and other data broker partnerships. When you submit a name and address, the service cross-references these databases and returns the best-match phone numbers and email addresses.
The quality of the results depends on how many data sources the service uses, how recently those sources were updated, and how good their matching algorithms are. No service is 100% accurate. You're looking for one that consistently returns valid, current contact information at a reasonable price.
What you get back
A typical skip trace result includes:
- Phone numbers (usually 1-3, ranked by confidence). These may be cell phones, landlines, or business lines. Cell phones are what you want for texting and calling.
- Email addresses (usually 1-2). These may be personal or business. Personal emails are generally better for initial outreach.
- Full name verification. The service confirms the name associated with the property matches the contact information.
- Age and demographics (some services). Useful for understanding who you're dealing with.
- Additional property ownership (some services). Helpful for identifying investors who own multiple properties.
Hit rates and what to expect
Hit rate is the percentage of records that return at least one phone number or email. Good services achieve 70-85% hit rates for phone numbers and 50-70% for emails. If a service claims 95%+ hit rates, be skeptical. They may be returning old or invalid numbers to inflate their stats.
A more useful metric is contact rate: of the numbers returned, how many actually ring and are answered by the right person? This is harder to measure and varies widely. Expect roughly 30-50% of returned phone numbers to be currently valid and reachable.
Rule of thumb: If you skip trace 100 records, expect 75-80 phone numbers back. Of those, 30-40 will actually connect you with the right person. Plan your outreach volume accordingly.
Batch tracing vs. single lookups
Most skip trace services offer both individual lookups and batch processing. The economics are very different.
Single lookups
You enter one name and address and get results immediately. Pricing is higher per lookup than batch rates. Best for: verifying a specific seller or investor you're about to contact, adding a single buyer to your CRM, or spot-checking batch results.
Batch tracing
You upload a CSV of names and addresses (sometimes hundreds or thousands at once) and get results back in minutes to hours depending on the volume. Batch pricing is significantly cheaper per record than individual lookups. Best for: building your initial buyer list, working a new marketing list, or refreshing stale contact data.
If you're going to trace more than 50 records at a time, batch processing is always more cost-effective. Upload your entire list, get results, and then work through the contacts systematically.
Skip tracing for buyer identification
Most people think of skip tracing for finding sellers (motivated homeowners, absentee owners, pre-foreclosures). But skip tracing is equally valuable on the disposition side for finding buyers.
Here's the workflow:
- Pull public records of recent investment property purchases near your deal (cash purchases, absentee owners, short hold times).
- Extract owner names and mailing addresses from those records.
- Skip trace the list to get phone numbers and emails.
- Reach out with your deal package. These are proven active buyers in your market.
This approach is more targeted than buying a generic "investor list" because you're identifying people who have actually closed on investment properties in the specific area where your deal is located. They've already demonstrated buying intent in that market.
Maximizing your hit rate
The data you submit directly affects the quality of results you get back. Better inputs equal better outputs.
- Include full name, not just first and last. Middle names and suffixes (Jr., III) help the service match the right person, especially with common names.
- Include the mailing address, not just the property address. The mailing address is where the person actually lives, which gives the service a better starting point for cross-referencing.
- Include the property address too. Some services use both addresses to improve match confidence.
- Clean your data first. Remove duplicates, standardize address formats, and fix obvious typos. Garbage in, garbage out.
Caching and re-tracing
Once you've skip traced a contact, save the results in your CRM. Re-tracing the same person a month later is a waste of money unless you have reason to believe their contact info has changed (returned mail, disconnected number, etc.).
Good CRM hygiene means tagging each contact with the date they were last skip traced and the source. When a number goes bad (disconnected, wrong person), flag it and re-trace just that record. Don't re-trace your entire list every month. For more on organizing contacts effectively, see our guide on building a buyer list from scratch.
Cost math: Skip tracing is one of the cheapest expenses in wholesaling. If your monthly traces help you close even one additional deal per quarter with a $5,000 assignment fee, the return on your skip trace investment is enormous.
Legal considerations
Skip tracing itself is legal. Using the contact information is where you need to be careful.
- TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act). Cold calling is generally allowed for B2B outreach. Cold texting has stricter requirements. Auto-dialers and pre-recorded messages to cell phones require prior consent. Manual dialing to cell phones is allowed but must comply with do-not-call lists.
- DNC (Do Not Call) registry. Scrub your phone list against the National Do Not Call Registry before calling. The penalty for calling a registered number is up to $43,792 per violation.
- CAN-SPAM. Email outreach must include your physical address, a clear unsubscribe mechanism, and honest subject lines. Don't use misleading headers or deceptive content.
- State laws. Some states have additional telemarketing restrictions. Check your state's regulations before starting phone or text outreach campaigns.
Choosing a skip trace provider
When evaluating skip trace services, compare on these factors:
- Hit rate. Ask for sample data or run a test batch of 100 known records to measure accuracy.
- Price per record. Compare batch pricing across providers. If you are paying significantly more than competitors for the same hit rate, shop around.
- Speed. Batch results should come back within minutes for small batches (under 500) and within an hour for larger ones.
- API availability. If you want to integrate skip tracing into your workflow, you need an API. Not all services offer one.
- Caching. Does the service cache results so re-tracing the same person doesn't cost you again? This saves significant money over time.
Skip tracing is one of the few expenses in wholesaling that directly generates revenue. Every dollar you spend on good contact data is a dollar invested in deals you can actually close.